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A mantle plume producing almost as much heat as Yellowstone supervolcano appears to be melting part of West Antarctica from beneath. Researchers at NASA have discovered a huge upwelling of hot rock under Marie Byrd Land, which lies between the Ross Ice Shelf and the Ross Sea, is creating vast lakes and rivers under the ice sheet. The presence of a huge mantle plume could explain why the region is so unstable today, and why it collapsed so quickly at the end of the last Ice Age, 11,000 years ago.

David Coulter was in Copenhagen when he got an email that catapulted him into the stars. Coulter, 36, is a self-taught programmer. He spent 10 years in industry jobs, then left for graduate studies in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, which operates Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. “I just wanted to learn about outer space,” he said. He picked the right place. The second-year grad student found himself on a team that was the first to take images of neutron stars merging, beating a group from Harvard, perhaps explaining the origin of metals such as gold and uranium....

If we have such an overwhelming scientific “consensus” about the supposed threat of catastrophic man-made global warming—and about the political and economic solutions to it—then why do advocates have to sue scientists to prevent them from questioning it? That’s the question raised by a $10 million lawsuit lawsuit filed by Stanford engineering professor Mark Z. Jacobson accusing other scientists of defamation for critiquing his scientific work in favor of “renewal energy.” That’s not how science works. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work. Jacobson made a name for himself and became something of a media celebrity for...

The nation’s top environmental protection official signed a directive Tuesday aimed at preventing conflicts of interest while bolstering the independence and integrity of scientists who advise the government. Under the new policy announced by Scott Pruitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, researchers and scientists who currently receive grants from the agency are not eligible to fill open slots on three science advisory groups. “Whatever science comes out of EPA shouldn’t be political science,” Pruitt, appointed by President Donald Trump, told reporters during a press conference at EPA headquarters in Washington. “From this day forward, EPA advisory committee members will...

LEAD — Construction on the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF), which will house the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), is underway. Groundbreaking ceremonies took place July 21. Tuesday, the Sanford Underground Research Facility and Fermilab held a joint informational meeting to brief local residents on what to expect from construction activities and from the economic impact of the project in the months ahead. Giving the presentation were Sanford Underground Research Facility Executive Director Mike Headley and LBNF Project Manager Josh Wilhite. The presentation began with the major features that will make the DUNE research being done at the LBNF a...

Image credit: WMG, University of Warwick Researchers at the University of Warwick have identified what is believed to be the earliest known marine navigation tool ever discovered. The artifact, now determined to be an astrolabe, was excavated in 2014 from the wreck of a Portuguese explorer ship which sank during a storm in the Indian Ocean in 1503. The ship was called the Esmeralda, part of a fleet led by Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, the first person to sail directly from Europe to India. The astrolabe is believed to date from between 1495 and 1500, which would make it...

New measurements confirm cosmos should have self-destructed if Big Bang true! Despite the organization’s $1.24 billion annual budget for 2017, the physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, are being forced to admit failure in their latest effort to explain why any of us are here. Indeed, why there’s even a “here” here at all. “The universe should not actually exist,” said Christian Smorra, a physicist at CERN’s Baryon–Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) collaboration. CERN, founded in 1954, features a circular tunnel some 17 miles around that houses a particle accelerator, which uses peak energy of 14 trillion electron...

The Sunlight by Which We See Is Ancient Msgr. Charles Pope • October 22, 2017 • I was meditating on time today, precipitated by some things I have recently learned about the light of the Sun that reaches Earth.I have long known that to look up into the night sky is to look far into the past. Looking up at the star Sirius, I am seeing 9 years into the past. Looking over at the star Antares, I am seeing 250 years into the past. And when I look the star Rigel, I am seeing 600 years into the...

All jokes aside, tonight is the night if you want to see Uranus.

Mention chemotherapy and most of us will cringe in horror at the thought of the dreaded side effects of this standard medical treatment for cancer. However, a new treatment without involving debilitating chemotherapy is on the horizon. According to a University of Hong Kong medical expert, this new therapy that kills cancer cells by boosting the body’s immune system is now undergoing human clinical trials and could well replace chemotherapy within a decade. Thomas Yau Chung-cheung, clinical associate professor at Hong Kong University, shared the progress of 200 cancer patients in the city who are undergoing this new immunotherapy treatment...

Note: This piece was co-authored by H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.In the world of science, debates rarely end. Only after years of careful analyses, rigorous scientific studies, and the replication of findings can scientists safely declare they believe a theory has likely been proven. And even then, real scientists know virtually every scientific conclusion is subject to further debate and experimentation as additional insights are discovered.On the topic of the science of climate change, including the causes and potential dangers, the debate is still very much alive and well. But the current climate-change debate held in most public forums, including in...

A genomic analysis of ancient human remains from KwaZulu-Natal revealed that southern Africa has an important role to play in writing the history of humankind. A research team from Uppsala University, Sweden, the Universities of Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand, South Africa, presents their results in the September 28th early online issue of Science. The team sequenced the genomes of seven individuals who lived in southern Africa 2300-300 years ago. The three oldest individuals dating to 2300-1800 years ago were genetically related to the descendants of the southern Khoe-San groups, and the four younger individuals who lived 500-300 years ago were...

It has always bothered me that while science cannot explain things like hate and love, good and bad, and many of the most important things in human life, it is used as “authority” for meddling in human affairs. The impulse to explain everything with science has generated a group of pseudoscientists that provide a great tool to power hawkers for their agendas. When I first heard the term “social science,” for example, I wanted to laugh but couldn’t. We all know – has it been forgotten? – that there is no science for that which science cannot define, the case...

One of my favorite kinds of news stories is the report of a new scientific study that verifies the obvious. You've seen them. New research finds that heterosexual men are attracted to very attractive women. Evidence collected by wildlife researchers has confirmed that bears really do use the woods as toilets. But some research that corroborates the obvious is exciting because some people refuse to accept the obvious. Which brings me to the work of Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University and the author of "What It's Like to Be a Dog." Berns has, from what I can...

Mothers who experience an infection severe enough to require hospitalization during pregnancy are at higher risk of having a child with autism. Two new studies from MIT and the University of Massachusetts Medical School shed more light on this phenomenon and identify possible approaches to preventing it. In research on mice, the researchers found that the composition of bacterial populations in the mother’s digestive tract can influence whether maternal infection leads to autistic-like behaviors in offspring. They also discovered the specific brain changes that produce these behaviors. “We identified a very discrete brain region that seems to be modulating all...

The scientists who produce those doomsday reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finally come clean. The planet has stubbornly refused to heat up to predicted levels. Right now the scientists owe us an apology so enormous that I doubt even a bunch of two dozen roses every day for the rest of our lives is quite enough to make amends for the damage theyÂ’ve done. Thanks to their bad advice on climate change our gas and electricity bills have rocketed. So too have our taxes, our car bills and the cost of flying abroad, our kids have been...

A trio of Australian academics say that the gender gap in physics — boys being better at the subject than girls — can be traced to the “pee games” in which boys engage during their youth.

For years, the Washington establishment held up Sally Quinn, the wife of the late Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, as the society doyenne par excellence and a “serious” reporter. The Great and Good would gather at her mansion to bat around the issues of the day. Much talk of a sinister religiosity afoot in the land would ensue. But it turns out that Quinn, when not passing around drinks and appetizers to these self-proclaimed rationalists, was in the back playing with her tarot cards and concocting hexes for her enemies. In her new “spiritual memoir,” Finding Magic, Quinn discloses her...

ALEX POURNELLE TEXTS: Hi I’m afraid that Jerry passed away We had a great time at DragonCon He did not suffer. Please feel free to post this news. Rest in peace, Jerry. You will be missed.

"We take a virus, learn how it works and then we leverage it," said Dr. Michael Diamond, a professor of molecular microbiology, pathology and immunology. "Let's take advantage of what it's good at, use it to eradicate cells we don't want. Take viruses that would normally do some damage and make them do some good."